Pictures in UK SERPS

[nomis5]

I'm seeing pictures against entries in the SERPS for my main website and many others. I don't keep a constant watch but it wasn't the case in my niche a week or so ago. It's the more popular search terms which have the pictures. Anyone else noticed the same?

UK, informational.

[aakk9999]

Interesting! It would be great if you could describe a bit better what are you seeing, i.e. how the SERPs look like, where are the pictures shown, how large etc.

[getcooking]

I'm assuming you're talking about the "rich snippets"? In the past 30 days I've noticed them appearing for results that aren't marked up specifically for anything. Google just seems to grab the main image from the page and use that. And, it does seem to be for popular terms, not obscure things. Around the same time I noticed that my site was starting to regain some of its rich snippets (for pages marked up with the appropriate structured data) which it lost completely several years ago. I'm hoping that it means Google is finally deciding my site isn't Pandalized anymore and not just a change to their snippet criteria.

[lucy24]

Overlapping:

Also: which picture, and have you any idea when or how the search engine fetched it? The question has come up once or twice-- but always concerning some minor search engine, certainly not Google.

"which picture" = for example, is it always the first one on the page (first <img> element in the html), or the one closest to the text in the snippet, if any, or some other criterion that you can figure out.

"when or how" = pick your most obscure page and try an exact-text search-- something that's guaranteed to bring up the page. Make note of the time. Do logs show an image fetch right then and there? Is it a 200 (full fetch), a 206 ("yup, still there") or a 304 ("hasn't changed since last time you saw it")? Alternatively, see when google last fetched the image in question. It would be interesting-- but maybe not possible-- to know if there's an "If-Modified-Since" header.

[vlexo]

Are you talking about something like this:
[i.imgur.com...]

That's happening for a pretty big term, just on mobile in the UK. I've seen it come and go, but it has largely stayed there, and no other websites appears to have that, just that one website. The page is frequently updated and is practically just a 'search page' or listings page. It's an interesting one, as it takes up a lot of real estate in the SERPs.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:12 pm (utc) on Mar 26, 2016]
[edit reason] Replaced link to twitter with twitter screenshot obscuring detais [/edit]

[Andy Langton]

Answer boxes and rich snippets are going a little crazy in the UK. Plus id:url has been showing images for a few months now.

[nomis5]

Yes, it's exactly like rich snippets but I don't and never have had them on the site I am talking about. The picture is on the left (about 20%) with the SERP description on the right.

It is no longer happening. The image fetched was the one which related to the search query not the first on the page.

[Andy Langton]

If you search for id:www.example.com/article do you see the picture? I've seen this pretty consistently for a while now for pages with images in them.

Also certain types of content seem to get left hand pictures - recipes, for instance.

[getcooking]

Just noticed this from seoroundtable...

Google Testing Images In Search Results Snippets
Mar 22, 2016 - by Barry Schwartz
[seroundtable.com ]

...which explains (I believe) what has been showing in the SERPS

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:26 pm (utc) on Mar 28, 2016]
[edit reason] Added SER post title, date, etc [/edit]

[MrSavage]

Less results on page 1 as a result correct?

[flatfile]

@getcooking
I haven't used Google custom search in years, but I remember the search results looking like those on your link. I wonder if there's anyone here using custom search, if the thumbnails are still there on the custom search then this has a chance of becoming permanent.